Point Refunds for Deleted Giveaways

When a giveaway is deleted, points will now be returned to every user that entered. If you already have the maximum of 400P, you will receive points above the limit. For example, if you had 390P, and a giveaway you entered for 50P was deleted, you would then have 440P available. As expected, since you would be above the 400P cap, you would not receive additional points every 15 minutes until you dropped below 400P.

If a giveaway is undeleted, the opposite will occur, and points will be removed from your account if you previously entered. For example, in the above situation you had 440P after the 50P giveaway was deleted. If you continued to enter giveaways until 360P and the giveaway was then undeleted, you would drop to 310P, since you would once again have a 50P entry in that giveaway. In a rare situation where you used most of your points, and only had 10P available, the undeleted giveaway would lower you to -40P.

Removing Giveaway Entries

If you remove a giveaway entry, you can now also receive points above the cap. This means if you have 380P, and you remove two 15P giveaway entries, you will have 410P available. You would then remain at this amount until the points are spent.

Yes, if you sync your account and existing giveaway entries are removed because you now own the games, then you will have the points returned to your account. Or, if you win a giveaway, and the site removes other entries you have for the same game, you will also have the points returned.

Some changes I wanted like a little more points and the "refund" of deleted giveaways but I would have preferred that the cap would have remained at 500 points. A 500 points cap was really fine especially for the times there's an influx of giveaways. I think that more users will stash or bank points now.

EDIT: And I hope that the maximum giveaway entry will remain at 50 points.

Hi cg, thanks, those changes seem good to me.
What about the cap to 50 points for a single giveaway (I mean a game that costs 100$ is considered 50p). It was something that you wanted to remove, in the end do you decide to keep it?

Some people will want to keep the cap as low as possible because they don't want to make hard choices. They feel entitled to join for a pricey game without it affecting the number of entries they can put in other giveaways. These people will not be happy with any rise of the maximum cap.

I prefer the 100P cap (or even a 400P cap) because I feel like if you want to join a giveaway for "Call of Duty: WWII - Digital Deluxe" then you should have to think twice between joining for that or for a bunch of cheaper games.

Kind of strange in that regard to see you and a few others panicking about supposed banker advantages where this update hasn't really made any difference in that regard.
Seems like a lack of understanding of the processes combined with fantasizing some extreme unrealistic examples, that can be read in some posts.

Maybe yours less than others, but some heavily blow it out of proportion.
All the while there are far bigger and more important issues to fix.

why there's a cap at all

cg wrote about that: to avoid a situation where a user comes in a/after a month and just enters everything in sight.
Gotta agree with that, some cap is needed. But it can be far bigger than now. I'd say 2 or 3 days are no problem at all, more possibly works too.

None of this really affects me much (I've got points coming out my butt still), but I'm always curious about the "hows and whys" of everything -- so I ask.

EDIT: To put it in better perspective, I was more concerned the community would become a ghost-town if things were made too easy for the causal visitor, and that everyone would become a casual visitor. So far that doesn't appear to be the case, so I'm all good with the changes.

The changed point cap won´t affect me, I´ve never had full points (not even 300, the old limit) since they changed the system, and it´s not like I enter that many giveaways now, I usually enter ones with an hour or less left and with fewer than 300 entries :(

Not to reach the end of cause. That's practically impossible.
I'm talking about entering long lasting giveaways as a source for more points if you need them.
Users who don't always spend there points could find a very large point-bank in it.

I though it might make it possible or at least easier to save up more points. Maybe my concerns are unfounded.
I'm not a expert here and don't use those tricks myself. It was simply the first though I had when I heard about this limit.
I guess cg will notice if users finds a way to use it for his/her adventage.

Not sure I understand - effective storage is much higher since you can bank several days' worth of points and cash out whenever. It's pointless though since you won't receive points while exceeding the cap. But it's very nice that excess points aren't 'wasted' anymore.

By juggling points from giveaways about to end towards newly created long-term giveaways, you could probably reach even higher numbers.
But either way, your point bank is stored as entries you can remove whenever. The cap itself doesn't really change anything in that regard. You'd always want to move points from entries to other entries and keep your raw point value close to zero (so you're far from the cap and can keep generating points).

you yourself cannot undelete GA (just tested), it's probably meant for support undeletions in cases when deletion occured because of accident. Like recently Support was mass deleting Outlast 2 GAs because they were for Outlast 1 freebie from Humble, but in case someone was actually giving away Outlast 2 (I know at least one person who did create real one,m but she stated in description and didn't get deleted I believe) support can undelete GA they deleted by accident. Probably you can also write a ticket to restore GA which was running but you deleted it by accident (for example you made 2 GAs, 1st with wrong region lock, 2nd with correct, wanted to delete first but by accident deleted 2nd).

Good job with the point refunding - this calls for a celebration after two years! The 'undeleting' part makes sense too, though I've never ever known it was possible to do this, nor have I ever seen such a case before.
Temporarily allowing you to break the cap limit is a lovely feature too, especially if you have a lot of ongoing entries for a game that you win while you're away - the excess points refunded from the giveaways you're forced to leave are then safe. Thumbs up for adding this feature on your own.
I still find 6P way too low, but at least it's better than 5P. Maybe we'll even get 7 or 8 if you're in a better mood next time.

not really that common I would say - each time something gets removed from GA list because of it being currently free and flooding SG Support is deleting GAs for said game that were created after promo went live. Since support cannot monitor website 24/7 it usually takes at least few hours for game to get deleted, in this time good chunk of these GAs will end (especially flash ones).

You can give away games which were previously free, you cannot give away games that are currently free - to avoid floods. Outlast got removed from GA list, GAs got deleted and it got readded only after humble promo ended, now with nocv tag.

Good evening cg. Is there a chance or is there anything in the works for a group refresh button on SG? This would not only help groups in the SG community but it would also help lessen the workload for SG support as there would be a lot less tickets for rerolls due to people no longer being apart of the group for whatever reason. The support thread is in the link below. Thanks for your time.

Doesn't change my opinion about new system neither positive nor negative. I still stand on position thatr flexible system just heavilly reduced would be much better than any form of static fixed system - be it 5P/15min or 6P/15min.

We can view deleted giveaways on user profiles. If we come across anything suspicious, such as a high amount of deleted giveaways, the user would need to provide a reasonable explanation for why they exist.

It might not happen, but I don't think it's a given. For every GA of a free game one still gets 3 slots, right? That's potentially 300 extra points for each of the friends of the fake-GA creator, without him/her losing any slots in total. All they need to do is create GAs of free games, and these don't cost them anything.

Let's hope that the detection that cg mentioned above will be sufficient to catch such attempts, or even better - that it will be enough to deter people from trying ;-)